At last Miss Matty and Mrs Forrester became perfectly awestricken.  They whispered together.  I sat just behind them, so I could not help hearing what they were saying.  Miss Matty asked Mrs Forrester “if she thought it was quite right to have come to see such things?  She could not help fearing they were lending encouragement to something that was not quite”—­ A little shake of the head filled up the blank.  Mrs Forrester replied, that the same thought had crossed her mind; she too was feeling very uncomfortable, it was so very strange.  She was quite certain that it was her pocket-handkerchief which was in that loaf just now; and it had been in her own hand not five minutes before.  She wondered who had furnished the bread?  She was sure it could not be Dakin, because he was the churchwarden.  Suddenly Miss Matty half-turned towards me —

“Will you look, my dear—­you are a stranger in the town, and it won’t give rise to unpleasant reports—­will you just look round and see if the rector is here?  If he is, I think we may conclude that this wonderful man is sanctioned by the Church, and that will be a great relief to my mind.

I looked, and I saw the tall, thin, dry, dusty rector, sitting surrounded by National School boys, guarded by troops of his own sex from any approach of the many Cranford spinsters.  His kind face was all agape with broad smiles, and the boys around him were in chinks of laughing.  I told Miss Matty that the Church was smiling approval, which set her mind at ease.

I have never named Mr Hayter, the rector, because I, as a well-to-do and happy young woman, never came in contact with him.  He was an old bachelor, but as afraid of matrimonial reports getting abroad about him as any girl of eighteen:  and he would rush into a shop or dive down an entry, sooner than encounter any of the Cranford ladies in the street; and, as for the Preference parties, I did not wonder at his not accepting invitations to them.  To tell the truth, I always suspected Miss Pole of having given very vigorous chase to Mr Hayter when he first came to Cranford; and not the less, because now she appeared to share so vividly in his dread lest her name should ever be coupled with his.  He found all his interests among the poor and helpless; he had treated the National School boys this very night to the performance; and virtue was for once its own reward, for they guarded him right and left, and clung round him as if he had been the queen-bee and they the swarm.  He felt so safe in their environment that he could even afford to give our party a bow as we filed out.  Miss Pole ignored his presence, and pretended to be absorbed in convincing us that we had been cheated, and had not seen Signor Brunoni after all.

CHAPTER X—­THE PANIC